


i could never be obama

by Psythe



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Politics, The Homestuck Epilogues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 13:20:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28886016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Psythe/pseuds/Psythe
Summary: But he could be someone almost as important, in his own way.
Relationships: Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas
Comments: 8
Kudos: 37





	i could never be obama

**Author's Note:**

> For Inauguration Day.

DAVE: he barely even got a chance to prove himself

DAVE: he was sworn into office and it was cool and everything was gonna be great but then

DAVE: everyone died a few months later because of meteors

DAVE: dude was just gettin warmed up... so sad

DAVE: i wonder if he would have fixed the economy

DAVE: i bet he would have fixed the economy

KARKAT: DAVE, AS MUCH AS I ENJOY LISTENING TO YOU RAMBLE THROUGH YET ANOTHER CHAPTER OF YOUR FREESTYLE OBAMA FAN FICTION

KARKAT: DON’T YOU ALREADY HAVE A BASIS FOR KNOWING HOW HIS PRESIDENCY WOULD HAVE GONE?

KARKAT: I MEAN, WASN’T HE PRESIDENT IN THE TIME LINE JANE GREW UP IN TOO?

DAVE: oh

DAVE: yeah

DAVE: i mean yeah of course i know that

DAVE: i just dont like to think much about that time line

DAVE: it doesnt really feel like its

DAVE: canon?

KARKAT: DIDN’T SOME CLOWNS TAKE OVER THE WORLD OR SOMETHING?

DAVE: i dont wanna talk about it

  
Of course, now that you've gone and said it, you can't help but indulge idle curiosity a little. You can never ever let Rose know about your exact feelings vis a vis this issue. She would never shut the fuck up about how there is a thing related to the idea of 'canon' that you actually do care about. You would be seventy-five-ass years old, shaking-your-fist-at-these-kids-and-their-future-memes old, making fun of how goofy and overwrought the prose in her latest book is, spend a solid week assembling an academically respectable argument to this effect that you would then drop in the spectacularly ironically sound format of a one thousand two hundred post long Twitter thread - and she would be able to say 'But you care about Obama canon.' and you would be undone. She would not even need one whole tweet to destroy you. She would not even need one whole _line_ of a tweet.

So you do your research in absolute secrecy. You log off all of your social media and chat accounts. You wait until the opening credits of _Real Housespouses of New Texas_ \- a series of obnoxious, IQ-point-subtracting notes that are very unfortunately ironed into your brain at this point by the sheer amount of hours Karkat has put into watching that fucking show - register in your earholes, and you make absolutely sure that he is streaming it rather then indulging in a rare live viewing of a brand new episode, so that there won't be any commercial breaks that give him a chance to come looking for you. When you fire up the ancient Old Earth browser Roxy provided to access the SBURB-preserved ruins of their Earth's internet, you use the _incognito version._

So it's in the hermetically sealed privacy of your own room that you discover the truth of your main man Obama's time in the big house. You see the tragedy of his time in office, how his enemies all united against him and stole the thunder right out from under his wings. You learn about what happened _after_ he was president, and the less time spent on that the better.

But you also learn about the people who backed him up. About all the good shit he did. You learn that he _did,_ in fact, fix the economy. Obama, you know, would have made the Mayor proud.

And you learn about the guy who, years before the Batterwitch came in and ruined everything, stood up for democracy, and followed in the footsteps of his best bro. You're looking at the news articles about that guy when you see it. It literally takes your breath away. As in, like, the image basically reaches out of the screen and socks you in the stomach and all the air leaves your lungs.  
  


  
You reach up, slowly, and touch the shades on your face, appreciating them in an entirely new way, for the very first time. Could John have known, all those years ago, what shades like these truly meant, in the larger socio-political context that existed _beyond_ the world of ironic gestures tied to Ben Stiller's weird, sort of gaunt face?

You don't think it really matters, when it comes down to it.

You feel in your heart something you think you probably always knew, on a spiritual level, but never had the words to truly express. You would never claim you were like Obama, or that you might serve as any kind of Obama-analogue in the political allegory that is the run for president you know Karkat needs to make. That's a downright unacceptable level of arrogance. If you knew you, and you wanted to be Obama, you'd be disgusted with you.

But you want to be Karkat's best bro. You want to be his man who backs him up, who gets things done, who talks to the people in a way he can't sometimes. You wanna be the guy who balances him out - someone angry and righteous, and someone cool and smooth (to the degree that you still think of yourself as cool and smooth). Together, you'd make an unbeatable governmental team.

You could never be Obama.

But you really, _really_ want to be Karkat's Joe Biden.


End file.
